A treasure trove of old knitting footage

by ysoldateagueApril 21, 2014

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole last night when I remembered seeing that British Pathé had uploaded their entire archive to Youtube. Out of curiosity I searched the archive for knitting related clips and found much more than I expected. I made a playlist here, although I haven’t finished watching it so there might be some fairly unrelated stuff. My favourites are below.

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Promotional film touting the benefits of knitting with cotton: “it’s not all fuzzy like wool!”

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“Now you can knit fashions for every occasion.” Now I am struggling to imagine the perfect occasions for dressing with a scene of lambs on one’s chest, or in imitation of a chessboard.

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SO MANY QUESTIONS! “Swiss women in mountain village dress as men in Feminine demonstration.” The inter title apparently translates as: “Switzerland, a curious manifestation of feminism. In this sweet mountain village women have completely adopted masculine dress and attitudes.”

Masculine clothes, farm labour, pipe smoking, swagger #ANDknitting!

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Hand knitted dresses – women knit parts of garments at home then send them to be assembled in Madame Madeleine’s workrooms. London.

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Audio track is missing but some great examples of fair isle and intarsia jumpers, plus it’s always fun to see people knitting and sewing.

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e “Something for wifey”. The narration might be cringeworthy but I would actually like an armchair with a hidden storage compartment that can be accessed while sitting in the chair.

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Cowichan sweaters being made in Canada.

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1952 showcase of knitted fashions that highlights the influence of earlier knitting on the designs.

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An early video tutorial!

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Knitting with dog wool is practically a sub-category in this collection. This one highlights that no coupons are needed.

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Fascinatingly the schoolgirls knitting in this clip knit in a fairly standard yarn-in-Right-hand manner, but some of the older women have the yarn looped around their necks in the Portuguese style.

Pricing patterns has always been one of the hardest parts of designing and I’ve often felt like the “standard” price of knitting patterns is both lower than other similar products (eg. indie sewing patterns) and doesn’t really reflect the amount of work that goes into them. At the same time, it’s totally fair to worry that rising pattern prices will price people out.